Hitachino Nest

Kiuchi Brewery has been at work in Naka, in Ibaraki prefecture, since 1823, when the village headman Kiuchi Gihei put a surplus of rice to use and began brewing sake. It stayed a sake house for most of two centuries.

Beer arrived in 1996. A change in Japanese law two years earlier had finally made small-scale brewing legal, and Kiuchi was among the first through the door, launching Hitachino Nest with the owl that has been on the label ever since. The brewery had spent 170 years learning fermentation before it brewed a single beer, which is a longer apprenticeship than most craft breweries get.

What followed was a range that reads like nobody was watching: ale matured in shochu casks, beer brewed with raw ginger, a barley variety revived with local farmers after decades out of cultivation. Sake, shochu, wine and whisky are all made on the same site.